and you can do just like in the main game and just shoot near the cashier and he'll still hurry up

now that online is somewhat fixed its pretty fun, better than what i thought, i like the main game better still, seems more alive

Thu Oct 03, 2013 2:13 pm

Mark in Minnesota

Joined: 02 Jan 2004
Posts: 2053
Location: Saint Louis Park, MN

The way the game teleports you around to join missions in progress is very immersion-breaking. The post-mission "select next job" dialogues are worse.

Thu Oct 03, 2013 2:51 pm

Juangirls don juan anything to do with me

Joined: 16 Sep 2003
Posts: 1135
Location: Ohio

I played for a few hours the other night, and I enjoyed it quite a lot. However right now it's having trouble connecting, and the one time it tried to load it appears my character and all progress has been deleted. Hoping thats not the case anyway

and i'm a pretty horrible driver. mostly just a lazy driver because I know I can just slam into most things

Thu Oct 03, 2013 3:08 pm

Brynjar

Joined: 12 Dec 2006
Posts: 1476
Location: Rivertown

But what about the single player?

I think this might be my fav. GTA along with Vice City.

Thu Oct 03, 2013 3:45 pm

Mark in Minnesota

Joined: 02 Jan 2004
Posts: 2053
Location: Saint Louis Park, MN

Well, since you're asking...

I really liked the single player. Some of the gold medal challenges are badly designed and non-fun (should I really be proud of, or challenged by, or rewarded for, being able to use a thumbstick to close spam ad pop-ups fast enough?) but for the most part the story is great, and again succeeds powerfully at deconstructing the "supercriminal in a corrupt, dystopian America" trope at the heart of the GTA franchise.

The game looks hard at the nature of loyalty between criminals, and at the relationships between criminals and the rest of the population. In maybe the third full mission, Lamar stereotypes the entire GTA dynamic as he describes how and why he thinks he and Franklin will someday betray Simeon--and (Trevor's various gang wars aside) the game works hard to keep that kind of betrayal from becoming a regular occurrence. That kind of thing absolutely plagued Niko's campaign in GTA IV, and seeing them move away from it in the writing for this game was really refreshing in some ways.

I was surprised by the ratcheted-up levels of sex/nudity, violence, and drug use. The deleted "Hot Coffee" content that got GTA: San Andreas in trouble a little less than a decade ago was far tamer than this.

Trevor Phillips is one of the most disturbing protagonists I've ever seen in a video game. I recently had a nightmare involving a person from my past turning up and behaving like Trevor does. It's not often a video game gets past my defenses like that.

There aren't many taboos left for a game like this to break. I'm not going to list any off because that could escalate quickly--but it really is sort of breathtaking how far they took things since the days of GTA3 and "zomg you can kill a hooker and get ur moneys back."

The "jumping between protagonists" feature was timely for me, and helped answer the question of how mainstream titles would achieve some of what State of Decay did in an indie context. I'm now conceiving of a large scale world using a mix of procedurally generated content and real GIS databases (sort of like what Google Earth and Sketchup do when wired together) to establish motorcycle clubs like The Lost (or, for that matter, Sons of Anarchy) and operate them as something halfway between State of Decay's survivor communities and GTA V's "crew members." Recruit & train prospects, and eventually start to be able to play as them; permadeath, no indispensable protagonist, open-ended story/gameplay options, real law enforcement that relies on investigation and arrest warrants rather than "wanted levels", etc.

I've been saying for a few years now that our descent into the last strange days of the Moore's law prediction have meant that gaming innovations are increasingly not going to be technological, but design/invention-centric. GTA V isn't really as much of a grand technological achievement (in the sense that, for example, Skyrim seemed to be) as it is masterful incremental improvement on the ideas of Max Payne, GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Hitman, etc.

I'm excited to see what GTA VI and beyond will look like; will we see a Los Santos that can simultaneously render and drive enough vehicles to simulate real L.A. traffic?

But I'm also skeptical about whether that would really inform the gameplay. In four years and working with a nine-figure budget, Rockstar made an almost comically large game world--so big that there are intricate parts of it where you don't spend any time at all. Cut content? DLC? Probably a bit of each. Being able to simulate more stuff going on in that world only buys them something if they have the resources necessary to populate the world with more stuff. Unless they resort to procedural generation, their creative pipeline isn't going to scale to meet the capabilities of the new hardware.

Meanwhile a positively tiny team (Undead Labs) made a game for a fraction of the cost which did way more to push the state of the art. Imagine what they would do with four years, a hundred million dollars worth of talent and two hundred million dollars in marketing.

GTA V is great. One of the best games ever made, from a consistently strong studio and one of the most successful publishers in the game. And yet... with the right kind of eyes it's getting easy to see how games like this are going to be overtaken by better ideas, by smaller and more agile studios.

Even without the Johnny Klebitz cameo, GTA V would have felt a little like a goodbye to the franchise.

Not that this is what I'm talking about when I say that, but can you really see another game with Lazlow in it after this one?

Thu Oct 03, 2013 4:58 pm

NeuroA champion of Kurtis SP

Joined: 19 Jul 2002
Posts: 7852

maybe because i played red dead at a slower pace but i feel like red deads story/missions was A Lot longer

I'm not gonna lie Neuro, I hate that you posted that link. The title alone is a spoiler if you haven't started playing it and if I wanted to know if I missed some stuff I'd go to a wiki on my own.

Fri Oct 11, 2013 11:24 am

NeuroA champion of Kurtis SP

Joined: 19 Jul 2002
Posts: 7852

if you look at it ,its not really a spoiler at all, its an unsolved mystery still

Fri Oct 11, 2013 11:28 am

Brynjar

Joined: 12 Dec 2006
Posts: 1476
Location: Rivertown

You posted a link called Aliens in GTA 5, ofcourse it's a spoiler. Nothing in trailers and marketing hinted at this.

I clicked the link because I finished the story but this spoiled in ways I didn't think it might because of reasons I can't say because it's a spoiler.

Fri Oct 11, 2013 12:09 pm

NeuroA champion of Kurtis SP

Joined: 19 Jul 2002
Posts: 7852

well im sorry if that "spoiled"anything for you but i dont consider any of that spoilers

i would like to know though how are you supposed to find the 50 letters and 50 spaceship parts without looking at some sort of map, is there a way to find them all or youdo you really have to just search every single nook and cranny in the gta world, how are people doing this?!?!!?

and this is a good way to find out what you have done and havent to get 100%

whats this "Checklist items marked with a colored bar indicate contribution to the 100% completion." does that mean only those count? that is dumb if some of the things you do dont count

Sat Oct 12, 2013 12:19 am

Juangirls don juan anything to do with me

Joined: 16 Sep 2003
Posts: 1135
Location: Ohio

eh the aliens link didn't bother me, if anything it gives me some stuff I want to do that I might not have discovered naturally on my own. i really need to play with the game more. just discovered you can throw sticky bombs from cars so right now I'm driving around and blowing up giant busses and groups of people

Sat Oct 12, 2013 4:28 pm

Mark in Minnesota

Joined: 02 Jan 2004
Posts: 2053
Location: Saint Louis Park, MN

So I'm playing GTA Online last night in free mode, and there is a "High-Priority Vehicle" available. Players are able to compete for this vehicle, which must be stolen, re-sprayed, and taken to a drop-off point in a remote corner of the map.

A player has the car and has taken it to be re-sprayed. I post up outside the shop with an assault rifle and destroy several tires on the car plus kill the driver as he's leaving, take the car before he re-spawns, and go back into the mod shop to repair the damage I caused with the gunshots. I am invulnerable to attack inside the mod shop, and dawdle in there for about ten minutes, making a cocktail for myself and playing around with the map system a bit.

When I come out, three separate players have gathered outside the shop and are fighting each other. I drive away up a grass hill, catching just enough air to clear a concrete barrier and get on a freeway. I am well on my way before they can give chase. I take the car far north to get it repaired again, and am driving south to the drop-off point. Another player chases me and opens fire, but I evade him and am pulling into the drop-off garage when he blows up the car with a grenade, and me in it.

Keep in mind: If I had blown up his car to defend myself, I would have gotten hit with "bad sport" and eventually condemned to play on a server populated only by griefers like this guy.

So I call up Lester, one of the NPC contacts, and set a bounty on the guy, inviting other players to be paid money out of my in-game supply to kill him. He starts immediately talking shit to me, putting a bounty on me, bragging that his is for more dollars than mine, etc. Each time he dies from my cheap bounty I replace it with another cheap bounty; meanwhile I steal a helicopter, park it on the top of the tallest building in the city, and wait up there with a heavy sniper rifle which I use to shoot down any copter that comes after me.

This continues for about 20 minutes, including angry messages sent to me offline via Xbox Live itself ("What did you think I was gonna do? Not blow up the car?"), before he enlists aid from other players, a group effort with military choppers and fighter jets, all to come after me and punish me for retaliating when he did something to fuck me up at no benefit to himself. He literally would have made more money, and spent less money on ammunition, by letting me drop off the car and then killing me as soon as I was got out of the drop-off.

I've engaged in similar antics myself--but what I haven't done is gotten incredulous after it happened.

A day or two earlier I lost several hours of income from missions when I chased a bountied player north into the mountains of Blaine County. When I got there another player in his crew destroyed my car with an RPG, earning himself a ding for being a Bad Sport but stranding me in the mountains with no way back to civilization other than traveling on foot. He and his friends (who, it turned out, had been placing bounties on each other as bait) then penned me in on that mountain area where no vehicles spawned and kept repeatedly killing me even though I was dropping no cash and the ammunition they were using to fight me was costing them money. The terrain where I was respawning offered no cover and because I had no cash on me I could not switch to passive mode. I was consistently under attack from one of them within seconds of respawning. Accessing the banking system to transfer money from my bank account took so long that I couldn't withdraw without being killed, as did accessing any of the phone or interaction menu options I might have been able to use to teleport away. Literally the only option I could see to get out of it was to sign out of the game and hope that when I signed back in I got placed into a different session. This could have been trivially fixed by giving me a death screen option to respawn at a different location, which they didn't do.

Think about this: If you didn't lose in-game cash for dying at the hands of other players, and were rewarded for overcoming the challenges other players create for you (e.g. rank points and cash for killing your arch-nemesis) then everything I'm talking about here would just be happily raving about emergent gameplay, just like I was doing about Red Dead Redemption back on page 30 of this thread.

I just told you a story about how proud I was that a team of other players working in concert had to use a fighter jet to bring me down! Instead you're getting several paragraphs about how much the game punished me for getting into this fight in the first place. This seems like a design error by the game's developers.

Some further thoughts about this:
1. The player versus player aspects of the game are what they are. There is no meaningful way to opt out of them and participate only in the cooperative aspects of the game.
2. Dying in player versus player mode costs money--disproportionately more than the other player gains by killing you. Money is used to limit and control access to the game's higher-end content, which means that when other players kill you (outside of the bounty system) they are denying you access to the game's best content at little or no direct benefit to themselves.
3. Rockstar has plans to sell in-game money for real money.

The system they use to prevent griefing is broken to the point of being inadequate; other than the penalty for destroying personal vehicles (which makes it harder to defend against aggressive players) the only way to get "Bad Sport" status is with things like in-mission team killing or quitting instanced missions in progress.

The net result is a system where player versus player activity is used to whittle away in-assets, and the only way to prevent this from happening is by participating in the non-sandboxed missions at the expense of free play... unless you pay Rockstar extra money to defray these costs.

A more cynical man might suggest that, given the incredible quality of design on display elsewhere in the product, the whole thing has been quietly engineered to encourage use of "cash card" purchases.

To be clear: The best apartment currently present in the game costs about $400000, and vehicles and upgrades go considerably beyond that in price. Getting competitively equipped for the late-game online content probably requires close to a million dollars. The most lucrative missions seem to award a maximum of around $20000, and once you've accumulated six figures worth of cash every death in free play costs at least $2000. Vehicle theft in free play, especially of vehicles Simeon wants for missions, can randomly result in bounties being assigned.

A bad twenty minutes in the sandbox can eradicate multiple hours of progress during the missions, and if you don't have money proportionate to your in-game progress you will not be competitive in the racing or deathmatch style of missions.

If you're good at missions, devoted to playing missions that earn you decent money, and cautious about how you play in sandbox mode, $100000 an hour in earnings seems achievable--but even at those levels you're actively avoiding seeing some of the game's less lucrative content. Going beyond $100K or so per hour only looks possible to me if if you exclusively play with organized, disciplined crews that do things like pool proceeds from races, agree on match types, and predetermine winners. Or you could pay around $25 extra US and get a million dollars worth of in-game currency without the repetitive, farming gameplay.

Again, a more cynical man might think that this stuff has been carefully tuned to tax lengthy play in the online game's signature mode, coupled with microtransactions to offset that tax. Toil in the peer to peer hosted game modes to unlock content, or play in the public sessions and see that progress quickly erased.

But I'm an optimist. I'm assuming all of this will be fixed in a couple of months. I hope so; I'll likely have moved on to other things by then in any case, and I'd like to see more of the multi-player content (heists, max-rank missions, etc) before then... without having to spend money on microtransactions to get access to it.

Tue Oct 15, 2013 12:58 am

NeuroA champion of Kurtis SP

Joined: 19 Jul 2002
Posts: 7852

i refuse to pay for cash card no matter what

i think its actually designed well and balanced to get you to do / try the missions and side stuff, SO you can free roam, but really, it costs nothing if you really want to free roam thug it out, you can go berserk no matter what , in online mode if i eventually get money for cool stuff , then thats cool, but im there for the player vs player aspect in an open world if i want the other stuff i play the more-alive story mode, the whole bad sport thing is meaningless to me, thats why i play online to battle the other players! yes here and there you will team up with others, and if you are in a crew you dont even need to really, and you can join several crews, gta online in my opinion is played best when you go beserk and battle it out, dont try to play it like an rpg, although if you are good at the fight you will gain a lot of money and experience like an rpg, even if its slow, its good that its slow earning though

also theres supposed to be tons(?) of new free dlc updates adding more and more stuff to do, right now they are still smoothing everything out